


Corpus Analysis

by burglebezzlement



Series: The Nice and Accurate Guide to Disrupting an Apocalypse [1]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Amnesia, Canon-Typical Violence, Charlie Lives, Charlie-centric, Chuck Lives, Demons, Gen, POV Charlie, POV Charlie Bradbury, Resurrection, Running, Singer Salvage Yard, Spoilers for Lost, Thunderstorms, carver edlund - Freeform, references to past alcohol abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-27
Updated: 2016-05-04
Packaged: 2018-06-04 22:33:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 12,308
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6677992
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/burglebezzlement/pseuds/burglebezzlement
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Charlie Bradbury finds a copy of Supernatural #22 at a convention, it’s her first clue to why she can’t remember the last three years of her life. But even if Charlie can track down its author, Carver Edlund, he may not offer answers she wants to hear.</p><p> <em>“It’s a series of books,” Chuck says. “I’m glad you’ve enjoyed the journeys of Sam and Dean. I’m flattered by the attention, but the Supernatural books are a product of my possibly over-active imagination. I have no intention of writing a sequel.”</em></p><p>
  <em>“Nice con speech, dude.” Charlie leans back. “I found your sequels.”</em>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

The dealer’s room at NorWestMidWestCon isn’t one of the selling points, but Charlie’s taking a turn through anyway, killing time looking at corsets made out of Dr. Who-themed quilting cotton, and cat’s ears of varying quality. The book dealers are mostly selling used books. She’s halfway through a vendor’s offerings when it snags her — Mystery Spot, #22 in a series of books she’s never heard of.

She pulls it out and reads the back cover. Standard pulp take on a Groundhog Day plot. Nothing that should interest her. Reads the first page. Decent writing, but she’s seen better. Hell, she’s written better.

Standard manly-man heroes taking on a cliche plotline. It shouldn’t interest her.

But it does. It’s familiar. It’s nagging at her. It’s like an aching tooth.

She turns to the booth’s proprietor, a man with a scraggly gray beard and a Starfleet Academy T-shirt. “Hey, do you know anything about this series?”

The man shrugs. “Not really. They’ve got a bit of a cult following, though.”

Charlie checks the inside cover for the price. _Wait, what?_

“Twenty bucks for a used paperback? Really?”

“They don’t sell on Amazon,” the guy says. “But in person — I get fans in here regular who try to buy them for $40, $50. You don’t want it, someone else will.”

Charlie goes to put the book back, but it’s like it’s stuck to her hand — she can’t put it down. (Some part of her doesn’t want to put it down.)

She peels a $20 out of her wallet and hands it over to the man, who nods without looking at her and puts the money in his lockbox before setting his chin back down into a ragged H. Beam Piper.

She shrugs, throws the book into her Bag of Holding, and heads off. She’s meeting some folks from one of her online groups for a one-stop pub crawl of the hotel bar in ten, and she wants to dump stuff off at her room first.

* * *

It’s a few weeks after the con when Charlie finally gets around to cleaning up all the swag she brought home — the con book and the crap she brought back from Dealer’s Row and all the free postcards and stickers they picked up from the bid tables, and shit, is that Lana’s phone number? On paper?

“Sorry, H,” she says, looking over at bobblehead Hermione Granger standing on her desk and feeling vaguely guilty. She’s usually better about cleaning up than this. She’s been avoiding the pile of junk on the counter since the con.

The reason becomes clear when she finds _Supernatural #22: Mystery Spot_. 

She reads it that night. 

It’s not good. Not really. It doesn’t pass the Bechdel test — hell, it doesn’t have female characters, not really. It’s nothing she’d normally read.

But it’s compelling. It’s tickling something in her brain that she can’t quite place.

She throws it into the Goodwill bag by the door after she’s done reading it, but three days later, she takes it out, and looks up Carver Edlund on Amazon.

No listings for sale — yeah, the books are indexed in the system, but the bookseller was right — there is nothing listed for sale on the actual website.

Weird. 

She starts digging into it a bit — checks out Abebooks. 

“Oh, that isn’t right.” She rocks back in her chair.

It looks like someone’s trying to hide their tracks. Someone’s cut the link between the books existing and the books being for sale. And that someone looks like they used some tricks that are a lot like the ones Charlie keeps up her sleeve.

She finds a couple copies indexed in the warehouse of one of the major used booksellers and drops an order into their system, bypassing the front end. Maybe more books will clear this up.

* * *

Over the next few weeks, paper and cardboard and plastic packages containing copies of _Supernatural_ show up at Charlie’s PO box. The Post Office workers start getting curious, but Charlie just shrugs.

More books don’t explain anything — they’re still nothing Charlie would have read for any normal reason, but she’s got that sense of deja vu, that feeling that maybe this is what could explain _the thing she does not think of_. 

She starts indexing locations, keeping a Google Earth pinboard of confirmed locations from the books. Some of them have been moved. The Mystery Spot in Charlie’s universe is in California, not Florida, and there’s some other weirdness like that.

After ten books, Charlie gives in and dives into the online fan forums.

They’re dying — Charlie’s been in enough fandoms to recognize the stench of a decaying fanbase. But there are still a few die-hards.

She cuts herself off from the fan forums when she finds herself weighing in on a topic about whether the “real” Sam and Dean look anything like the models on the covers of the books. _How do I have an opinion about this?_

But then she reads the next shipment from the Post Office, and she’s got a continuity question, and she’s sucked back in.

* * *

The fan forums are where she finds the tattoo.

Her tattoo. The one on her shoulder. The tattoo that she doesn’t remember getting.

Charlie pushes the computer back and goes to the couch, wraps herself up in a blanket. _I’m not shaking, you’re shaking._

The _tattoo_. The thing about the past couple years — the years she mostly doesn’t remember, or remembers only parts of — that freaks her out the most, apart from _the thing she does not think about_ , which really fucking freaks her out, but that’s why she doesn’t think about it.

She remembers her ComicCon tattoo. Not much about getting it, but there’s a story leading up to it, a story leading past it. She’s got coherent memories on either side of that event.

And besides. Her Princess Leia tattoo is _adorable_. She might have been drunk, but it’s in character.

Getting a tattoo from a series of manpain adventure novels? A series she doesn’t even remember reading?

She swallows down on nausea. 

She needs to find the author. She needs to know.

* * *

Searching for Carver Edlund — it’s hard. Someone hid his tracks extremely well, so well he might almost be dead. There’s eight years of message board and forum posts from his fans, including some who are fanatically, frighteningly devoted to the topic. None of them have found so much as a whiff of the man.

Charlie finds the later books, the books that were only posted online, early in the process. At first she assumes they’re just more fanfic, but there’s something about the feel of the writing — something that gives her the same feeling of _almost knowing_ that she gets from the books.

She breaks into a university server to steal some code for corpus analysis, which tells her what she already knew. Written by the same person.

But — and here’s the weird thing — BeckyWinchester176, the one who posted them, is clearly not the author of the books. And she’s active in the fan forums. Charlie reads through all her posts and decides that if BeckyWinchester176 knew where Carver Edlund was right now, she’d be sharing. Maybe not the location, but she’d be making the sort of coy _can’t tell you everything, it wouldn’t be safe!_ posts that she was making a few years back, under one of her earlier handles. 

So that’s not a lead.

Charlie tries putting up a murder board in her apartment, like on Castle or any of a billion other TV shows, but having photos of Carver Edlund (from his con appearances) and putting up actual physical pushpins in an actual physical map map doesn’t shake anything loose.

* * *

In the end, as with so many things, the answer involves throwing more processing time at the problem.

Charlie’s out for a run. She’s been sleeping badly. The nightmares are back, but this time, instead of trying to protect her mother, she’s racing down corridors and fighting her way to her mother’s room, only to see a shadow version of herself there beside the bed.

She’s not normally a runner, but waking up three times a night after facing The Thing She Doesn’t Think About — yeah, she’ll try everything AskMetafilter can throw at her nightmare problem, thanks. So she’s off coffee and she’s eating healthy and taking magnesium supplements and she’s, ugh, doing yoga and _running_.

And trying to find Carver Edlund.

She’s out on a long loop by the reservoir — it’s funny; she doesn’t remember running, but it’s like her body does. She’s not hitting any of the aches and pains that her research told her to expect as a n00b runner.

That day’s mission on Run, Zombies, Run! finishes up just as Charlie comes out to the bit of the path at the top of the reservoir, looking over the water. It’s a cool, foggy day, and the water looks like mercury, sullen and silver under the faded spring sky. 

Charlie turns off the app and lets her music keep running. What was she doing in those wilderness years she can’t remember, apart from getting a tattoo she hates and reading trashy manpain novels and apparently taking up running? She was still herself, right? Should she start running facial recognition on LARP groups and con photos?

She starts walking home. It’s funny how people don’t change — you always go back to what you’re used to.

And then she realizes something. Carver Edlund — he didn’t seem like the kind of guy who could do anything but write. She’s seen footage of him, just a few videos from the one con he did. He’s an indoors geek, through and through.

And if he’s still alive, he’s got to be paying the bills somehow.

When Charlie gets back to her apartment, she steals some processing cycles from a supercomputer that’s meant to be crunching Republican voting demographics. Sets it looking through writing — more corpus analysis. It’s a needle in a haystack, but it’s also the one trail someone might have overlooked. 

It’s three days later when her automated scan pings: Carver Edlund, or at least someone writing a great deal like Carver Edlund, has been located. 

“Hah!” Charlie punches the air. “My kung fu is the _best_ kung fu.”

The scan pinged on _The Marvey Brothers Mysteries #13: Mystery of the Painted Peril_. It looks like a series of tie-in novels. Charlie re-sets her parameters to run on Bob DeWolfe, author of The Marvey Brothers Mysteries, which pulls up another handful of Marvey Brothers books written by Carver Edlund. Apparently he’s sharing writing responsibilities on this one.

Unlike _Supernatural_ , these books are available in e-Book form, which makes it easy for Charlie to download and read.

They’re terrible. Really terrible. A knockoff of The Hardy Boys, but with more swamp monsters and cursed masks. 

They give Charlie none of the familiarity feels she’s been getting from _Supernatural_.

But they’re being written now. He’s active. He can be traced.

Charlie has to hack the accounting systems at the publisher and the book packager to trace the payments on her Marvey Brothers books to checks going out to someone going by the name Connor Allison in a small town in Manitoba, Canada.

_Manitoba?_

Connor Allison has no web presence — there are other people by that name out there, but none of them are writers from Manitoba. None of them look like Carver Edlund. And he hasn’t left many traces on his publisher’s system, either. He submits his books on a thumb drive, and his agent is the only one who seems to call him — and she must use some sort of Stone-Age tech, like a Rolodex and a landline, because that number is nowhere in his system.

But his agent has Conner Allison’s address.

* * *

Charlie’s planning the trip to visit Carver Edlund (Bob DeWolfe. No, Connor Allison) before she realizes that’s what she’s done.

Why not email? Or write? But Charlie instinctively knows he won’t respond.

“We can’t give him an out, H,” Charlie says.

H doesn’t reply, but Charlie thinks she looks sympathetic. Hermione Granger knows about impossible problems. 

The first question is which of Charlie’s identities will hold up to a border crossing. Charlie Bradbury — she’s not sure why she’s even still in this identity, if she’s honest with herself. Hoping for someone to find her? She probably won’t make it into Canada, though. _And Celeste_ — Charlie stops herself there. _The thing she does not think about_.

She’s got a reserve identity or three set up for herself, though. After studying them for a bit, she decides that Stephanie Verne will do. She’s already got the passport, so she just has to get the credit history set.

Charlie rents a car to make the trip to Manitoba, so she can ditch and fly back if she needs to. It’s a long drive — miles of planted fields. They’re just planted, all plowed furrows and short corn seedlings. Charlie stops for the night in South Dakota, and she sees fields of corn sprouts behind her eyes as she tries to fall asleep.

It feels familiar, the next morning — waking up, sweeping the room, grabbing toast and peanut butter from the crappy hotel breakfast bar. Stopping at a gas station and pounding back a bottled Frappucino. Her body recognizes this.

_I’ve done this before._

But she hasn’t. Or if she has, she doesn’t remember.

* * *

That afternoon, Charlie passes over the border — a bit of anxiety in an otherwise cornfield-filled day. Stephanie Verne holds up beautifully, though.

She decides to stop a few towns before getting to where Carver Edlund now lives. She tells itself it’s so she’s rested tomorrow — so she doesn’t show up on his doorstop too tired to argue him into telling her what’s going on here.

The truth is, she needs one more day to figure out what she’s going to say to him. One more night. Now that she’s on the road, looking for answers, maybe she’ll get some sleep.

She heads out for a run after she checks into her hotel — by the chain restaurants clustered around the exit, and out into the flat of the agricultural fields. The fields are muddy, torn up, huge puddles reflecting the sunset.

Charlie sets her head down and runs.

* * *

Charlie chooses her time carefully: 11:30, late enough that he’ll feel like he’ll need to open the door.

She chooses her clothing carefully, too. Standard-issue geek: babydoll tee with geeky slogan (unrelated to _Supernatural_ ), jeans, flannel, hoodie. His books seem pretty geeky. Maybe he’ll think of her as one of his tribe.

She brings coffee, too. Just in case.

Charlie’s heart is beating in her chest like she’s been sprinting when she steps up the stairs of the house. It’s in the center of town, a mid-century prefab with a porch with peeling paint.

She knocks at the door. No answer. 

She waits a few minutes, and then knocks again. Finally, several minutes later, the door opens, on a security chain.

A man just taller than her is inside. He’s wearing a robe, and his hair is sticking up. 

“What?” he asks. 

Charlie swallows. “Carver Edlund?”

His eyes narrow through the gap. “Nobody here by that name.”

“Wait,” Charlie says. “I know you wrote _Supernatural_. I… I need to ask you some things.”

“Lady, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

He’s closing the door. “I know you’re really Chuck Shurley,” Charlie says. “And — and if you don’t answer some questions, I can tell all the _Supernatural_ fan boards where you are.”

The door closes, and Charlie feels her heart sinking. _Didn’t mean to play that card._ She wouldn’t tell them — well, maybe. But probably not.

Then the door opens, normally this time. The man inside is clearly Carver Edlund, the one from the con photos Charlie’s seen.

“You wouldn’t,” he says. “How the hell did you find me, anyway?”

“Can I come inside?” Charlie asks. “I brought coffee.”

He steps back from the door and waves his hand vaguely. Inside, it’s a cave filled with old dishes, books, and stacks of paper. The light streams in through half-closed curtains over dusty windows.

Charlie hands over a bottled Frappucino, and he makes a face.

“Just for the record, this doesn’t count as bringing coffee.”

Charlie shrugs. “Not like this town has a Starbucks.” She shifts a stack of Marvey Brothers books from the couch and sits down. The springs collapse under her, leaving her ass several inches below her knees.

Carver Edlund sits down across from her, in his desk chair, one of the few open surfaces in the room. “So?”

“The Marvey Brothers?” Charlie asks. “Really?”

“They were invented by a book packager in the Seventies who was very high on acid,” he says. He glares at the Frappucino bottle, and then peels back the plastic to open it. “Don’t be a hater.”

Charlie pointedly looks down at the stack of books next to her. On the cover of the top one, Hank and Trey Marvey are fighting a creature copyright-infringed from the Black Lagoon.

“Fine,” she says. “What should I call you? Bob? Connor?”

“Chuck.” 

“Fine. Chuck, what can you tell me about _Supernatural_?”

“It’s a series of books,” Chuck says. “I’m glad you’ve enjoyed the journeys of Sam and Dean. I’m flattered by the attention, but the _Supernatural_ books are a product of my possibly over-active imagination. I have no intention of writing a sequel.”

“Nice con speech, dude.” Charlie leans back. “I found your sequels.”

Chuck looks — confused. He takes a sip from the Frappucino bottle and makes a face. “What sequels?”

“The ones posted on the internet,” Charlie says. “Did you not know that someone posted them?”

“I didn’t write any sequels.”

Charlie pulls out her tablet. “Yeah, well, corpus analysis says you did.”

“ _What?_ ”

“It’s how I found you,” Charlie says. She pulls up one of the later books and hands the tablet over to Chuck. “See?”

He looks at her like she’s lost the plot, but he takes the tablet and reads through it for a bit before handing it back to her. “I didn’t write this.”

“Or you don’t remember writing it.”

He stares at her, then, for a long moment.

“Fine,” he says, finally. “Fine. You can buy me breakfast. Somewhere outside of this house. This isn’t turning into a Misery thing.”

Charlie holds up her hands. “I don’t even own a pig.”

Chuck sighs. “That’s not making me feel better right now.” He looks at her again. “I’m going to get dressed.”

“Fine,” Charlie says.

“And don’t touch my computer while I’m gone.”

“Promise.” 

Charlie smiles. Like she’d need to physically touch his computer.

* * *

The diner’s at the center of town, in a crappy run-down commercial strip with more vacant storefronts than active businesses. It’s lunchtime now, so Charlie orders a grilled cheese and a Diet Coke. Chuck orders the pancake special, side of bacon, side of sausage, and keep the coffee coming.

He’s through the first cup before his eyes are properly open. “You’re paying for my breakfast.”

“Fine.” Charlie sips at the Diet Coke. Flat.

Chuck stares down into his coffee, and then looks up at Charlie. “So how did you find me? Did you bribe my agent? Because she swore she wouldn’t tell.”

“I found you myself. I told you. Corpus analysis.”

“I think you’re lying,” Chuck says. “I think my agent squealed.”

Charlie smiles. “It’s also how I found your AO3 account. I didn’t think Carver Edlund would be writing explicit —“

“ _Shut up_ ,” Chuck hisses. 

“I’m Charlie,” she says. “I’m here because I’m not sure what happened to me, and I think your series might have some answers for me. I know that sounds stupid, but I’m — I’m running out of straws here, dude.”

He stares at her.

“And — okay, so stop me if I’m wrong. But do you remember everything? Or did you wake up with part of your memory missing one day?”

Chuck sits back. He’s wearing a hoodie, and he looks like he wants to pull the hood up and disappear into it, wrap himself up inside his clothing until he blinks out of existence.

“Yeah,” he says, finally. “Yeah, maybe.”

Charlie’s heart starts beating faster. “Okay.”

“It — look, you have to understand. When I was writing _Supernatural_.... I wrote forty books in two years. You know who keeps that pace? Nobody. I’d get a blinding headache, drink myself to sleep, and then wake up with the whole story there in my mind. I’d write that day’s pages and then it started all over again. The publisher couldn’t keep up with me.”

“So why’d you stop?” Charlie asks.

“I’m not sure that I did stop.”

The food arrives. Charlie’s grilled cheese has an enormous stack of fries and a tiny cup of coleslaw on the side.

Chuck eats a few pieces of bacon and gets another coffee refill, and then looks back up. “When you’re a recovering alcoholic and you tell your doctor you’ve got memory loss… it’s like, No shit, Sherlock.”

“How many years?” 

“I don’t know,” Chuck says. “I remember writing the series, and then the publisher went under, and then… things get a little hazy after that. When I came out of it, I was by the side of the road in Manitoba with a laptop I didn’t remember buying and nine thousand, nine hundred, and ninety bucks. Canadian.”

“And you stayed in Manitoba? Why?”

“Why not?” Chuck’s eating his sausage now. “Houses are cheap here. They have internet.”

“Yeah, but…” Charlie realizes she’s sidetracking. “And you don’t remember anything about the time in between?”

“Not really. Vague, hazy shit. But I’m not sure what’s really my memories and what’s the stuff I was writing in Supernatural, you know?”

Charlie has a theory about that, but she knows it sounds crazy. So she takes another bite of her grilled cheese.

Chuck keeps eating his breakfast. Every now and then he glances at her from under his hoodie. 

“So what’s your theory?” Chuck says, finally. “What do you think happened?”

Charlie’s been thinking about how to share this. “Tell you what,” she says. “If I email you the rest of the books you don’t remember writing, would you read them?”

“Maybe,” Chuck says. “Are they any good?”

“You wrote them, dude.”

“Yeah. I’m a hack.” He snorts. “Okay. Fine, I’ll read them.”

“Okay,” Charlie says. “Can we talk tomorrow?”

It’s a potentially dangerous move. Charlie knows that. Chuck could decide to run. But Charlie’s seen his house. She’s counting on procrastination and laziness and yeah, maybe a little bit of curiosity.

Chuck doesn’t take her up on a ride back to his house, which is fine with Charlie. She borrows someone’s WiFi to flip Chuck the files — to his Connor Allison email, which will probably surprise him. But Charlie knows he hasn’t logged into his Chuck Shurley or Carver Edlund emails in years.

Maybe he’s testing her, not telling her which email to use. That’s fine. Charlie’s testing him too.

* * *

The next morning, Charlie wakes early. She’s not feeling good, exactly, but she’s full of restless energy and needs to get out.

So she goes for a run. It’s flat, and she misses her reservoir. Misses running hills. She’s not using Run, Zombies, Run! today, but she starts pushing herself to sprint for short intervals anyway. When she’s flying down the cracked asphalt road, pumping her arms and pushing her legs, she feels almost normal.

And then, when her chest feels like it’s exploding and her legs feel like they’re dying, she slows down to a jog to recover, and then does it all over again.

On the way back, there’s a field with sheep. She didn’t notice it on the way out — probably sprinting. They’re dark brown, their wool overgrown and laden with a winter’s worth of dirt. They look like the opposite of the white, wooly cotton balls she’d expect sheep to look like.

They come over to look at her, and Charlie stops to say hello. She’s always been a city geek. She’s never seen sheep this close up.

And then a dog runs out, from the house, and starts barking. Charlie nods goodbye to the sheep. It’s time to keep running.

* * *

Charlie stops by the diner to pick up a cup of coffee for Chuck the next morning.

His junk car is still in the driveway. He’s walking distance to the diner and the Super Variety, which sells both booze and food. He probably doesn’t drive much.

Or he decided to run, and left the car behind.

Charlie knocks at the door. Takes a deep breath.

When Chuck opens the door, he’s wearing the same robe as the day before. His hair’s sticking up like he’s just gotten up.

“Crap,” he says, looking at Charlie. “You are real.”

Charlie hands over the coffee. “What did you expect?”

He opens the lid, studies it for a bit before shrugging and taking a sip. “I told you. Things got kind of hazy there. I thought maybe it was starting up again.”

“You thought I was an angel? Didn’t seem like you believed in all that.”

“Doesn’t mean they don’t believe in me.” Chuck looks up and down the street. “You’d better come in.”

Inside, the level of entropy is identical to the day before. No signs of packing. The stack of Marvey Brothers books Charlie moved is still on the floor, so Charlie perches at the edge of the couch.

Chuck sits down in his desk chair, holding the paper cup of coffee in front of himself like a votive offering.

“I know what you think,” he says, finally.

Charlie smiles. “Yeah?”

“You think it’s all real.”

And there it is — cutting to the heart of the matter. _So you think a shitty series of books about the Apocalypse is real. How does that make you feel?_ Charlie doesn’t need Yahoo! Answers to know the diagnosis on that one.

“I wouldn’t say real,” Charlie says, after a bit. “Let’s say I adopted that as my working hypothesis.”

“You believe in it,” Chuck says, flatly. “Why?”

Charlie sits back on the couch, forgetting about the missing springs. “Because it feels right,” she admits, finally.

“Right? A world with angels and prophets and _racist trucks_ feels right to you?”

“Not right,” Charlie says. “Yeah. Not right. It feels… accurate. Like something I’ve lived through.”

Chuck looks away, takes another sip of coffee. “I read through the rest of the books.”

“And?”

“And I don’t remember writing them,” he says. “You’re sure they’re me?”

“The computer’s sure,” Charlie says. “I told you it was a hypothesis. I’m testing it.”

Chuck goes to take another sip of coffee, but apparently he’s already finished it.

“Why do you care so much? What’s in it for you?”

Charlie looks away from him. Wishes she’d brought a coffee for herself. Or a Frappucino.

“There’s some stuff I don’t remember,” she says. “Stuff I always thought I would. Or decisions I don’t think I would have made.” _The thing she does not think of_. She lets her mind glance off it. That particular redirection has become second-nature. “I want some explanations.”

Chuck drains the last of his coffee. “So what was your plan?”

“My plan?”

“Coming here. If I couldn’t help you.”

Charlie doesn’t work in plans. She works in modules. Chunks of potential plans that she can reconfigure and work with, bits of preparation that allow her more freedom than a straight line. But she’s got the next module ready. “I think we can track down Bobby Singer.”

“So you do think it’s real.”

“I am keeping myself open to all possibilities,” Charlie says.

(Yeah, she thinks it’s real.)

“How exactly?” Chuck starts playing with the cup. “Not that I’m saying I believe you.”

Charlie looks at him. It looks like he read something in the later books — something he remembers. Sort of. And she wants to push him on what it was. But then, he wants to push her on _the thing she does not think of_.

“I did an analysis,” she says, instead. “You include a lot of time in there — three hours to Cleveland, eight hours to Denver, whatever. Eighteen hours out from Bobby’s place. So I did an analysis.”

It wasn’t an easy job, mainly because Charlie started with the assumption that a ’67 Impala Chevy being driven on secondary highways probably couldn’t get much above 60 miles per hour. But that assumption mapped Bobby’s place across three states. Once she backed out and took some samples between two known points, she realized that Dean, if he was real, was probably a crazy driver. Probably ran people off the road. Because he was pushing that car well above the speeds it was designed for.

With the correct speeds, all the references to Bobby’s place cohered — came together in a cluster in southeastern South Dakota.

“It’s not far from here,” Charlie says. “Somewhere in South Dakota.”

“I didn’t put any last names in the books,” Chuck says. “You want to go drive to South Dakota and start asking for some dude named Bobby?”

“It’s Singer Storage,” Charlie says. “I’m assuming it’s Bobby Singer. And we don’t have to ask. We can check property records.” (Normally she’d already have checked them, online, but some of the counties in South Dakota were unreasonably untrusting of the internet and apparently kept some of their records in paper copies only. And she’d struck out on the property tax records.)

“So you want to go to South Dakota, and what, start looking at chains of title?” He sees Charlie’s expression. “What? I wrote Sam and Dean for years. I know how they research.”

“You never wrote much about that side of it,” Charlie says. 

“Yeah, well, maybe I know more than I wrote about.”

Charlie stares at him. Yeah. That’s why she’s here.

“So?” she asks. “Are you curious enough?”

* * *

Chuck’s not curious enough.

Charlie leaves him with her cell numbers — the real number and the Google Voice she keeps in reserve in case she needs to run. 

Chuck says he’ll call, if he changes his mind. He says it like it’s a huge concession. Like maybe he’ll actually think about it.

Charlie knows he’s not going to call.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Charlie’s out for a run when Chuck calls.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Posted just in time for tonight's episode to officially make this a canon-departure AU. *\o/*

Charlie’s out for a run when Chuck calls.

It’s late summer, one of those days when there’s no sign fall is coming, when there’s no sign of relief and the heat and the humidity make it feel like you’re running through syrup. Charlie’s body is pouring out sweat and her mile splits are a full minute slower than last week. Her muscles are screaming. Her lungs are gasping. Running is clearly torture.

 When she hears her phone ring, it’s the most excellent excuse ever to stop for a bit, stare out over the reservoir and think dire thoughts about the weather. (She is seriously contemplating a sweat band. Like she’s in a 1980s exercise video. Terrifying.)

The number doesn’t have a name attached — maybe a burner. Charlie swipes answer anyway. “Hello?”

“It’s Chuck.”

 _Chuck._ Charlie wasn’t expecting him to call, so hard she didn’t program any of his numbers into her phone. Or hell, maybe he is calling on a burner.

“Chuck?” she says, cautiously. She’s gotten some distance from the whole Carver Edlund fiasco over the past couple of months. Learned a few new techniques to stuff down _the thing she does not think of_. She’s signed up for a half-marathon in October. If there’s anything that lets you ignore something, it’s training for a half-marathon.

“Yeah,” he says. It sounds like he’s walking. He’s out of breath.

“It’s good to hear from you,” Charlie says. (She’s not sure if it is or isn’t.)

“Yeah, well, I wasn’t planning on calling,” he says. “I saw someone at the Super Variety.”

Charlie’s legs feel shaky. She rests against a fence, not caring about the dirt on her running shorts and tank. “So?”

“So they had black eyes,” Chuck says. He sounds super-freaked. “Black eyes.”

It takes Charlie a moment, and then her brain catches up. Black eyes. _Demon._

“Did they see you?” Some part of her, a part she doesn’t remember, is clicking into a routine she can’t remember learning. _Question the witness. Don’t raise red flags. Figure out what they know and what we need to do._

“I — I don’t know.” Chuck’s still short of breath. “I don’t see anyone behind me.”

“Did anyone else track you down?”

“I — no?” He’s quiet for a moment. “Look, did you —“

“I didn’t tell anyone,” Charlie says. “Or post it anywhere.”

“Yeah.” Chuck huffs out a breath. “I was afraid of that.”

Charlie feels like an idiot for asking the next thing, but she has to. “Do you have a demon’s trap? Back at your place?”

“None of this is real,” Chuck says. Like he’s trying to convince himself. “None of this is real!”

Charlie’s reading this as a _no_ on the demon’s trap. “Okay. Do you have some chalk? Or spray paint?” 

“I’ll trace that thing in mustard if I have to,” Chuck says. She hears him walk up a set of steps, and then a door slams behind him. “Look, did you track down Bobby Singer? After you left me?”

“I didn’t,” Charlie says. For reasons: First, the government thinks Bobby’s dead. Of course, Charlie’s read enough of Chuck’s books to know that the government has thought Sam and Dean were dead, several times over. It’s not a convincing argument. But.

And then — once Chuck refused to come, Charlie spent some hours on the road. Thinking about it. Thinking about what it meant, that she was trying to prove the impossible rather than thinking about _the thing she does not think of_. Problematic. 

So she went back to her apartment, and H, and her job, which is really more of a hobby when you can crack conservative Super PACs any time you need money, but whatever, it keeps her grounded. 

And she’s been running, and meeting people, and trying to cobble together a life.

But at Chuck’s call — there’s some part of her that’s at attention, pointing towards the trouble and whispering _I can fix this._

A part of her that she doesn’t remember.

Maybe this is someone she wants to be.

She pushes herself off the fence. There’s sweat pouring down her back. “Chuck?”

“I’m salting the doors,” he says. “Then I get to decide if ranch dressing or cocoa mix is better for drawing a devil’s trap.”

“Salt’s for ghosts,” Charlie says, automatically, and then she can’t decide if that’s from her forgotten years or from her obsessive reading of _Supernatural_.

“Yeah, well, I stole eighteen salt shakers from the diner,” Chuck says. “I’m bullish on salt.”

“Okay.” Charlie thinks. “Hey, do you have any mac and cheese?”

“This is Canada,” Chuck says. “I think I’m required to eat KD at least once a week.”

“Yeah. What about the cheese packets?”

Charlie hears Chuck toss something glass and then start opening cabinet drawers. “Yeah, no. If this thing doesn’t eat me, I need something to stay alive. I’m not going back to the fucking Super Variety.” She hears him slam the cabinets and open a refrigerator. “Well, what do you know, I’m out of ranch.” Hears a rattle of bottles. “Ketchup?”

“Chuck?”

“Yeah?”

“Do you want me to come?”

* * *

The run back to her apartment feels different from the long, slow slog up the hill. It feels easy. Charlie’s breathing in 90 degree humidity and pumping out short, easy strides. Her feet and her heart and her legs know where she’s going. Maybe better than she does.

Charlie has always lived her life with a go bag. She throws off her running clothes, takes the world’s shortest shower. Dresses. Throws a couple more things in — a suit. (Why a suit? But it feels important.) Another bag with all her copies of _Supernatural_ , the research she printed off for her murder board. Not that she needs it; she’s fully backed up, not on the vague-ass cloud but on the private partition she maintains on someone else’s server. (Sometimes she wonders if the IT team thinks it’s haunted, and just lets her stay there in exchange for that server always running suspiciously smoother than the rest.)

When Charlie packs H in the bag, she realizes she’s maybe not planning on coming back.

She checks her passports. Driver’s licenses. Burner phone. Credit cards.

Time to go.

* * *

The drive is different this time. She’s pushing her rental car. Pushing herself. Getting food to go and eating it in the car.

She clears Customs fast, because going through the border at 4 AM is a great way to make sure lines are short. Stephanie Verne holds up beautifully.

When the Customs agent asks her what her plans are in Canada, she says she’s visiting a friend. 

And then she’s driving through Canadian fields instead of American fields. They look the same — acres and acres of rapeseed, sometimes cows on grass. 

_Visiting a friend._ Well, maybe. 

She’s driving into Chuck’s town when she realizes that maybe some subtlety is called for here. So she parks next door to Chuck, pulling into the cracked asphalt of someone else’s driveway and hoping they won’t have her towed. (Or maybe the house is empty. She doesn’t see any signs of life.)

At Chuck’s, the doorstep’s still peeling paint. Charlie tries to look in the windows, but they’re dirty and it’s dark inside. So she gives up and knocks.

She’s about to call Chuck on his phone before she hears it — shuffling from inside. Chuck shouting something.

The door swings open, and Charlie’s squirted with something from a bottle. When Charlie squints, she realizes it’s a hand soap dispenser.

And now she’s damp and slightly soapy. “What the hell, dude?”

“Sorry.” Chuck looks past her, up and down the street. “Holy water.”

“Where did you get that?”

“Made it,” Chuck said. “I was Sam and Dean’s personal scribe for five years. You learn some of the basics.”

He lets the door open a bit wider, and pulls Charlie inside, over a wide ridge of salt.

The living room’s clutter has washed up around the edges of the room, and the bare floorboards have a complex design drawn out in something red and thick that smells of garlic. Inside the trap, there’s a middle-aged man with a beer gut. He’s pacing, pacing, around the center of the trap.

“The holy water works on him,” Chuck says. He sounds miserable.

“But — why —“ Charlie checks the trap. It looks stable, for something that was drawn in food. “Was he looking for you?”

“You’re here now, so let’s go, please?” Chuck’s grabbing bags. A battered laptop bag. A rolling suitcase that has definitely seen better days.

The man snarls, and now Charlie sees his eyes. _Oh, that’s creepy._ Flat black, like the shark she saw at the aquarium on that date with Maureen, a lifetime ago. Only that shark was cute.

“Shouldn’t we — like — find out why he’s here?”

“Don’t care. Time to escape.” Chuck squirts the man with holy water from the soap bottle. He yells, cringes back in pain.

“We can’t just, like, leave him,” Charlie says. Her heart’s beating like she’s running up a hill.

“Look, the moment he goes bye-bye, he goes downstairs. If they are looking for me, I don’t want to be here when that happens.”

“Can I exorcise him?”

“I just want to get out of here.” Chuck slings his bags across his back. 

“I’m going to try.” Charlie pulls out her phone. Runs a search for exorcisms. _Because I’d want someone to try, if I were the one possessed._ Maybe the dude being possessed is still in there.

Chuck included the full text of the exorcism in one of his books, and Charlie finds it — reads it off the phone screen from the phone she’s holding in trembling fingers.

The first, second, and third tries don’t take. _This is what you get for not joining Latin Club,_ Charlie thinks, on the edge of panic. The demon’s lashing back and forth inside the trap, and Charlie’s getting worried — whatever Chuck used to draw the demon’s trap, it’s not going to hold up.

And then — fourth try’s the charm. The man’s head snaps back, and a thick, oily smoke with a smell of sulfur belches out of his mouth. Goes through the floor. 

_Heading downstairs._

Inside the circle, the man’s body drops. 

“Come on,” Chuck says.

“Is —” Charlie looks down at the man, steps carefully over the lines of symbols and feels for a pulse. There’s one there, but barely. Or Charlie is bad at taking pulses. “He’s alive. What do we do now?”

“We run,” Chuck says, like it’s self-evident.

Charlie feels stupid for asking, but. “What did Sam and Dean do?”

“When they ran?”

“With the bodies. Of the people who were no longer possessed.”

“Oh.” Chuck looks down at the man in the circle, and Charlie realizes it’s the first time he’s looked directly at him. “Mostly they were dead bodies. There’s a reason they’re wanted fugitives.”

“Oh.” Charlie’s stomach twists. “You never wrote about that part.”

“Yeah, well. Author’s privilege. Maybe I didn’t always want to think about the body count.”

“I’m calling for help. What is that in Canada?”

“Use a burner,” Chuck says. “Where’s your car? Did you bring a gun?”

Charlie hauls the man on the floor into the recovery position. She smells garlic when she pulls his feet across the circle. Whatever Chuck drew this circle in, it’s burning on her hands.

“Sriracha,” Chuck says, defensively. “Look, there aren’t a lot of good food-drawing options. You try drawing those symbols with ketchup.”

They leave his front door open when they go.

* * *

Chuck makes Charlie get out of the center of town before he calls the emergency line from one of Charlie’s burners. He gives them his address and hangs up. Takes the battery out of the phone.

Once the battery is out, Charlie doubles back through town. She doesn’t think anybody will have the tech to run a live trace on the tip car — hell, they’re probably not even at Chuck’s place yet. But she’ll feel better if anybody who traces the tip phone thinks they’re heading north. 

They should be heading south. But south crams them down with their backs against the US border, and Charlie’s not sure Chuck’s ready for that. 

She mentally flips a coin. Heads east.

“Where are you taking me?” Chuck asks, a few towns over. 

“Hotel,” Charlie says. The adrenaline is wearing off. She’s about to fall into a deep hole of sleep, one she dug with two days of straight driving.

“And after that?”

“I don’t know,” Charlie says. “I didn’t exactly have a plan here.”

“Oh.” Chuck looks down at the burner phone. He runs the window of Charlie’s car down and hurls it out into a cornfield. “Okay.”

“Like… do you want me to have a plan?”

“I was kind of assuming you’d dump me by the side of the road in, like, Quebec. Or maybe New Brunswick, if you were being nice. I don’t really speak French.”

“Yeah, well, I don’t have nine thousand in cash.”

“That’s okay,” Chuck says. “I brought the money this time.”

They drive in silence through more cornfields. Past a sheep farm. Through a town too small to have a motel Charlie’s comfortable staying at.

“So why did you leave your car?” Charlie asks. She’s heading north for a bit, but only to pick up the highway. Highways mean hotels. Hotels without bedbugs or hourly rates.

Chuck sighs. “I’m not just leaving the car. I’m leaving Conner Alison. Do you know how damn hard it was to find a decent ID guy in rural Manitoba?”

“No more Marvey Brothers books?”

“I’m sure the next Bob DeWolfe will pick up on my grand tradition of torturing teen bothers with B-movie monsters.” Chuck shakes his head. “Damn. I can’t think about this now.”

“Yeah, well.” Charlie sees a hotel. It’s old but it looks less fleabag than most of them. And there’s a restaurant next door. Not that she needs food right now. She needs sleep. But.

“Fine,” Chuck says. He looks small in the seat next to her, even though he’s actually taller than her. “I brought some salt.”

* * *

Chuck doesn’t want to be alone, so Charlie mentally shrugs and asks the guy at the counter for a room with two beds. She pays with a credit card in Stephanie Verne’s name — no point in drawing attention with cash.

And then she’s falling asleep, on top of the motel comforter, which is probably disgusting and hasn’t been washed since it was made and has undoubtedly seen some truly heinous things. And Charlie is so tired, she can’t bring herself to care.

The last thing Charlie remembers is Chuck drawing salt lines across the windowsills with another one of his stolen salt shakers.

* * *

Charlie wakes once. The red LEDs of the bedside clock say it’s three. The absence of light around the windows says it’s 3 AM, not PM.

Chuck’s facing away from Charlie in the second bed, snoring quietly. 

She’s still tired. She uses the bathroom. Peels the plastic off one of the coffee cups as quietly as she can, and drinks a glass of tap water. It’s got a muddy taste and it’s the best thing Charlie’s put in her mouth this year. 

She drinks another glass, staring at Chuck. He’s drawn a devil’s trap on the carpet — she doesn’t want to know with what. She steps over it, careful not to smudge the lines, and then falls back into her bed. Back to sleep.

* * *

When Charlie wakes up again, the sun’s coming in through the windows. Chuck’s awake, rummaging through one of his bags.

She moves her tongue. _Ugh_ — it’s, like, plastered to the roof of her mouth. It feels like something made a nest in there. Foul.

“Morning,” Chuck says, looking over.

Charlie sits up carefully. “Is it?”

“More or less.” 

She stretches into her legs, arms, feeling muscle soreness and the lag from sleep but nothing worse. Probably dehydration. She’s felt worse when — _When what?_ she asks herself, but it’s another slammed door. Another thing she almost, but not quite, remembers.

Charlie showers. It looks hot and hazy outside, so she throws on a geek T and a flannel for air conditioning.

When she gets out of the bathroom, Chuck’s sitting by the window, staring out into the parking lot.

“I don’t think anybody followed us. Yet.”

“Yeah.” Charlie digs out her tablet and routes the motel’s crappy WiFi connection through a couple anonymizers before checking the news from Chuck’s former home town.

“Looks like the guy survived,” she says. It’s the top headline — KIDNAPPING VICTIM RECUSED FROM SATANIC CULT HOUSE.

Chuck doesn’t look away from the parking lot. “That’s good.”

“Yeah.” But Chuck can’t go home. Not that they thought he could… damn. “Hey, can we get breakfast?”

They load the bags and check out of the motel before heading to the restaurant next door. Chuck cleans up the salt lines and the devil’s trap, sort of, and Charlie tosses down a $5 Canadian bill on the night stand, hoping that’s the right amount of money to say _sorry for the mess_ and not _we’re bribing you not to report us_. 

The restaurant’s the sort of Denny’s knock-off Charlie’s always avoided. Chuck takes to it like his spiritual home, drinking tiny cup after tiny cup of dishwater coffee.

He’s finished off his stack of pancakes and half his sausage before he looks up. “So. What’s the plan?”

Charlie’s glaring at her waffles. These waffles an an embarrassment to the name of the Noble House of Waffle. “I don’t have one,” she says. 

“Does that mean I get dropped by the side of the road in New Brunswick this time?”

“What is it with you and getting dropped by the road in Canada?” Charlie looks up at him. “Wait. You don’t have a passport, do you?”

“Yeah, not so much. And even if I did have one… probably not a good idea to put Chuck Shurley back on the grid.”

Charlie’s mind starts planning again. “Okay. Do you actually want to stay in Canada? Because I can drop you here if that’s what you want.”

Chuck looks off into the parking lot. Still no fuzz, not that Charlie can see. 

“I want a lot of things,” he says. “I want to go back in time and I want to never have been mixed up in this. I want to have written my books, not Supernatural. I want to never have met an angel of the Lord, assuming that’s what happened and I’m not having a really complex mental breakdown right now.”

“All fair points,” Charlie says. She has a similar list of her own, but that list takes her too close to _thing she doesn’t think about_ and anyway, she’s not getting into that topic with Chuck at a greasy-spoon restaurant. “What do you want that I can actually accomplish?”

Chuck twists his mouth and takes another bite of sausage. “Not sure. What can you accomplish?”

Charlie remembers Chuck’s comment about how hard it was to find a good fake paper guy in rural Manitoba. “I can probably set you up a new identity,” she says, cautiously. “Get you back into the States. If that’s what you want.”

“Yeah,” Chuck says. “Let’s start there.”

* * *

Getting things set for Chuck with one of Charlie’s passport blanks requires a trip to a city with a copy shop big enough for the employees not to remember them, which kills the rest of the day.

They spend another night in a different fleabag motel. Chuck bought chalk and spray paint. Charlie won’t let him use the spray paint in the motel, but his chalked version of the devil’s trap is looking better. 

In the morning, they head back for the border. 

It’s humid out, and there are towering clouds building up in the west. Stormy weather. Tornado weather. Charlie flips on the radio to listen for warnings, but there’s nothing yet, or maybe the warnings are chasing the dial ahead of her as she flips through old pop songs.

“Dean liked that song,” Chuck says, when Charlie lands on a station that plays what Charlie’s always thought of as strip joint classic rock.

Charlie shrugs, leaves it on the station to finish the song.

Chuck stares out the window. It’s hayfields right now. 

“Thanks,” he says, finally. “I should have thanked you yesterday.”

“You were freaked,” Charlie says. “Understandable.”

“Yeah.” Chuck looks over at her. “You weren’t, though. Have you done that before?”

Charlie shrugs, her shoulder catching on the seat belt. “I don’t actually know.”

“Right. The memory thing.”

They drive a few more miles on in silence.

“So what’s the plan?” Chuck asks. “We cross the border, and — then what? You drop me off by the side of the road in Minneapolis?”

 _When did I become the mastermind?_ Charlie wonders. “I don’t really have a plan here, dude.”

She expects Chuck to say _It shows_ or _I know_ but instead he leans back against the seat of the rental car. “So if we make it across the border without getting caught by the Federales,” he says.

“We will.”

“Don’t jinx us.”

“Don’t insult my identity work.”

“I’m a bit paranoid here,” Chuck says. “Comes from five years of transcribing angel bullshit followed by a semi-failed memory wipe.”

Charlie thinks about that for a bit. “Do you think you’d have remembered without the later books?”

“No idea,” Chuck says. “Look, I’m trying to make an offer here.”

Charlie looks over, but lets him go on.

“When we get back through the border, knock on wood, no tempting of fate intended. Do you want to go check out Bobby’s place?”

“You didn’t want to go with me last time,” Charlie says. 

“Yeah, well.” Chuck stares morosely out at the cornfields. At the dark clouds in the western sky. “That was before the demon showed up at the Super Variety.”

* * *

Charlie’s identity work holds up at the border crossing, because of course it does. And then it’s a long slog of driving, driving, driving, on secondary highways, because they need to track back west to get to where Charlie thinks Bobby’s place should be.

The storms don’t hold off. There’s a tornado warning on the radio as they drive through Minnesota, but it’s called by county, and neither of them have any idea which county they’re driving in. By the time it’s relevant, it’s raining so hard Charlie almost pulls over. The water is pelting their car, like driving under a firehose. Like driving under a waterfall. It’s thunder-loud on the roof of the car and Charlie can barely see through the windshield. They couldn’t read the signs even if they knew they were there.

But then they get behind the rain, beyond the lightning and the thunder. And maybe things are looking better. 

Charlie thinks about the Bobby from the books and tries not to get her hopes up. Tries not to think she’s going to find someone with answers. 

They get a hotel room outside Sioux Falls for the night. One room, two beds. Charlie’s fake cards could spring for two rooms, but Chuck still refuses to be alone.

The next morning, they get breakfast at a Panera, because if Chuck can refuse to be alone at night, Charlie can refuse to enable his shitty diner coffee. 

Charlie starts with Minnehaha County deeds, right in Sioux Falls, and strikes out.

It’s not easy. The _Supernatural_ books suggest that the property’s been in Bobby’s family for years. Bobby should be the one paying the taxes, but if he is, he’s doing it under another name, because Charlie’s already checked (and occasionally hacked) all the current payment records. And there’s no Singer Storage listings on the internet. Like, none. Which in the age of Yelp is kind of suspicious.

Lincoln County is next — just south of Sioux Falls. The deeds are at the courthouse, a fancy building downtown. 

Chuck gets twitchy looking at the courthouse. “Do we have to clear security again?”

“Probably.”

The library’s next to the courthouse. “Can I hang out there instead?” Chuck asks, pointing.

“Yeah,” Charlie says. It’s probably going to be several hours of digging through hard-copy grantor/grantee books (and ugh, who made so many records hard-copy only? It’s antiquated). Chuck may as well hang at the library. He’s a writer, he likes books.

So they split. As expected, Charlie spends several hours hauling enormous books around and looking in vain for Singers. (You’d think there’d be at least a few, even if only by chance.)

When she gets out, Chuck’s leaning back against the car, looking nervously towards a sheriff’s deputy who’s hauling someone into the courthouse.

“I struck out,” Charlie says.

“Yeah?” Chuck smiles. He holds up his burner cell. “I didn’t.”

* * *

They head to a sandwich place a few blocks away with a ridiculous Bible pun for a name. Chuck makes a face when his sandwich comes with sprouts, and picks them off, clinically precise in his removal of the contamination.

Apparently either Bobby used to be less paranoid, or there was another Singer running the junkyard, because Chuck dug up an old Yellow Pages with a listing for the place. He took a picture on his burner.

It’s a listing, not an address. It’s listed by the road name only. Maybe they didn’t have addresses in rural South Dakota in the 1970s. But Charlie has Google Maps and aerial photographs. Given the road it’s located on, Charlie can resolve the location of a junkyard.

Charlie spends lunch hunched over her tablet, using Google aerials to roam down the road. It’s rural enough that StreetView hasn’t made it there yet — or maybe got deleted; no way of telling. Based on the de-linking of the _Supernatural_ books from Amazon, Charlie has to conclude that if Sam and Dean are real, they’ve had some pretty serious hacker backup at various points. Removing any hide-outs from StreetView is what she’d do, if she were the hacker helping them.

Or maybe it just is that rural. 

By the time Chuck’s done picking all the sprouts off his sandwich and consuming the remains, Charlie’s pretty sure she’s got it. 

She passes the tablet over to Chuck. “I think this is it. See the barns? And the cars?”

Chuck pokes at the tablet for a bit, zooming in and zooming out and moving up and down the road. “Maybe.”

“It’s the only thing on that road that fits,” Charlie says. She’s feeling jittery. Nervous. Like maybe they’re getting closer to some answers.

“Yeah.” Chuck doesn’t look excited. “Can I get a slice of pie first?”

* * *

Charlie’s rental car is still parked in front of the courthouse. Even though there’s a sheriff’s car right next to them, the sheriff is nowhere to be seen.

They’re headed back north for a bit, back up into the outskirts of Sioux Falls, sort of. Charlie’s got the coordinates in her phone and she’s letting the GPS navigate while she tries to breathe deeply and drive at the same time. She hasn’t been this close to answers before, but now that she is, she’s not sure if she really wants to know.

It’s a sunny day out, big puffy clouds up in the sky. But the air’s hot and humid and heavy, the way it often gets in late summer. It feels like thunderstorms.

Apocalypse weather. 

Charlie starts to realize something’s wrong when they get to the gate. It was described as rusty in the books, but here in real life, the gate’s not just rusty — it’s barely hanging on, and there’s a shiny new padlock.

They get out of the car. They yell a little, but there’s response. They can see rusting cars inside, but no new cars. Nothing that’s not covered with a layer of dirt.

Charlie yanks on the gate until she gets it open — by the hinge end, the rusty metal giving way. Chuck helps her move the gate against the lock, which is the newest thing here.

They can barely read the sign.

Inside the fence, they drive down a short lane of mud- and dust-covered car wrecks before they see it: the main house.

Burned. Falling down. Carbonized like Han Solo at the end of Empire.

“Oh shit,” Chuck says, like he’s having trouble taking in air. “Oh, shit, Charlie, do you think someone else did what you did? Figured out where he was?”

“I think the Bobby you described lived a dangerous life,” Charlie says, carefully. 

“This is my fault,” Chuck says, shrinking back into the car’s seat. “My books sent someone here. This is all my fault.”

“We don’t even know he’s dead,” Charlie says, but something in her, seeing this, says that he has to be. Says that when you’ve managed to hold on to a home base for years of chasing after the demons and the ghosts and the impossible things, you don’t give it up because of something like a fire. And a tree. And maybe some monster damage.

She gets out of the car, carefully. The ground is covered with metal debris. “Hello?”

The only sound is the wind. Overhead, the clouds are building.

Chuck gets out of the car, eventually, and they lock up and start poking around, carefully, because this place is full of rusty metal. A one-way ticket to Tetanus Town.

“We could come back tonight,” Charlie says, as they walk down another row of dusty cars with smashed metal leaning out to snag their clothes. “Find a My First Ghost Hunt kit at Target or something. Maybe there’s someone still here.”

“Hell no,” Chuck says. “If Bobby’s real, then Sam and Dean are real. And there’s no way the Sam and Dean I wrote let his spirit linger.”

Charlie isn’t so sure. But they keep looking.

When they get to the main maintenance garage, Charlie starts feeling like someone’s watching her. But then, this place is creepy; it’s natural to feel that way.

There’s more space inside the garage, between the cars, which are somewhat newer and way less dusty than the cars outside. The floor is covered with oil stains but at least it’s open.

And then Charlie’s whirling to see Chuck get tackled by something with fangs that jumps out of the shadows at them. 

_Shitshitshitshit_. She is not prepared for this. Her heart’s beating madly in her chest as she tries to take up a defensive position. Trying to find a weapon. She grabs a massive pipe wrench that would probably work on a ghost, but what the fuck is this thing? 

The thing still has Chuck, wrestling him down to the dust. It looks like a man, a wirey man not much taller than Charlie. He’s wearing a flannel shirt. Chuck’s struggling — throws a handful of dirt from the floor into the thing’s eyes. 

The dirt does nothing. The thing is going for Chuck’s neck.

 _Vampire._ Charlie’s moving forward, hitting the thing in the head, swinging the pipe wrench through the head, not to the head, all the way through the head, like they taught her. Like someone taught her. She doesn’t remember who, but the lesson is about to save Chuck’s life.

The vampire’s knocked sideways, off Chuck. But he’s also impossibly quick. He rolls, back up onto his feet and facing Charlie.

“Find something that can cut the head off,” Charlie yells to Chuck, who’s down on the ground coughing on the dust he threw.

“What?” Chuck yells.

“Decapitation!” Charlie swings the pipe wrench at the vampire again, but he’s not distracted this time. He jumps back and up onto one of the wrecked cars, up out of Charlie’s range.

“Fuck,” Chuck wheezes. 

He pulls himself up just as the vampire flings itself at Charlie and Charlie ducks sideways and swings the pipe wrench wildly. No damage. The vamp rolls back up again and he’s still standing. 

If you look away from the teeth, he looks fully human. 

Chuck frantically rummages through the shelves and drawers as Charlie circles the vampire.

“What are you doing here?” Charlie asks.

The vamp bares his teeth at her and just hisses.

 _Yeah, not human._

“What do you want here? Did you kill Bobby Singer?”

The vamp laughs, and it’s a worse sound than the hiss. At least the hiss lets Charlie remember this thing’s not human.

“Waiting for the others,” the vamp says. And charges.

Chuck throws a machete into Charlie’s hand and Charlie ducks sideways. She’s hit by the vamp’s nails, raking into her shoulder, but she’s still up and now he’s behind her, and she swings the knife sideways and bites into its neck. Tries to let the momentum of the knife carry through but fuck, the spinal column is _thick_ , this isn’t working —

Charlie pulls the machete out and Chuck hurls a can of ancient paint at the vampire’s head. It misses the head but hits the chest, bursts open, spattering dull green over the vamp’s hair and eyes, and giving Charlie an opening to take another swing at the thing’s neck.

This one cuts the spinal column. The vamp drops to the ground.

“Shit,” Charlie says. “Shit.”

Chuck’s got another rusty can of paint in his hand. “Is there another one?”

They search through the rest of the barn, but find no evidence of another vamp. Just creepy empty cars and tools on the wall (some of which would have been much better than the machete) and a lot of unanswered questions. 

When they get back to the mostly decapitated vamp, Charlie realizes its eyes are still moving under the paint and takes the machete to cut through the rest of the neck. The feel of it makes her retch. When she’s done, she kicks the head away, under one of the work benches, ignoring the dark blood pooling from the body.

Oh, god, the _smell_. Charlie tries to breathe through her mouth. 

A crash of thunder sounds from outside and both Charlie and Chuck jump. While they were searching the barn, the storm clouds moved in overhead. Lightning’s lighting up the sky and the dark outline of the burned-out house.

Chuck takes a deep breath and starts wheezing again. “Fuck.”

“Yeah.” Charlie looks over at him, but he’s still breathing. They’re both in one piece. “I can’t disagree with that.”

“I guess we got the right place,” Chuck says. “I mean. Based on the vampire.”

Neither of them are mentioning the obvious: Bobby’s long-gone. The Bobby described in the books Chuck wrote would never let a vampire move in. 

“We should get out of here,” Chuck says.

And then there’s another flash of lightning, and almost at the same second, a boom of thunder. It’s so close Charlie smells the ozone in the air. The rain’s falling now.

“As soon as the storm moves over,” she says.

Chuck stares out across the junked cars. The rain’s beating down, and the sound of it echoes in the garage.

“Maybe we’re both dead,” Chuck says, finally. “Maybe this is how we come to terms with it.”

Charlie’s stomach clenches at that, because there is no way, in any universe, that Charlie and her mother are both dead and they’re not meeting in Heaven. No way.

“Not possible,” Charlie says, her voice rough. 

“How could you be sure?” Chuck asks.

“I’ve seen LOST. I know the kind of crap writers go for when they can’t think of another way to resolve a story. Try something better, dude.”

Chuck sighs. “Maybe I don’t have a better answer.”

“Maybe that’s bullshit.”

“Yeah, well.” Chuck looks away. “I’m pretty sure I was dead, okay?”

Charlie pushes her hand over her hair, which is gritty with dust and sticky with blood. Not that her hand’s much better. “Dead?”

“Yeah.” Chuck glances down at the ground, and then lets himself slide down the junked car to sit. “I told you I didn’t remember anything on that road in Manitoba?”

Charlie pulls open the door of one of the wrecked cars, brushes some busted safety glass off the seat and sits down, sideways, so she can still see Chuck. Her shoulder is oozing blood but if her reading of the pain level is accurate, there’s nothing to worry about other than normal infection. It’ll hold up until the storm blows over and they can get into town and hit a pharmacy to get some stuff to clean it up.

“Yeah,” she says. “You remember something?”

“It sounds stupid,” Chuck says.

Charlie points at the vampire’s torso. “Even with that sitting over there?”

“Even with,” Chuck says. He leans his head back against the car. 

Outside, the thunder’s moved off a bit, but the rain’s still pounding down like it’s the flood to end the world.

“What’s your story?” Chuck leans his head back against the car. “You didn’t tell me why you want to believe.” He tries to whistle the X-Files theme song. He’s not very good at it.

“I’ll tell you mine if you tell me yours,” Charlie says. 

“I was brought back by an angel.” Chuck’s staring at Charlie like he expects her to start laughing at him.  

She doesn’t. “I read the books.”

“Yeah, well.” He stares off at the open door and then looks back at her. “The angel was wearing this woman who looked like Mrs. Prentice, my first-grade teacher, same curled gray hair and everything, and the first thing I remember is her scowling at me. She said that I’d been given a second chance and I was being brought back to Earth for a reason.”

“Did she say what?”

“No,” Chuck says. “Just handed me the money, pointed out the way to town, and took off in that crazy flappy thing they do.”

“Brought back,” Charlie says. “Like from the dead?”

“What else could it be?”

“And she said there was a reason,” Charlie says. “But you don’t remember dying.”

“Yeah, well, neither do you.”

Charlie shivers and her stomach does that thing it does when she thinks about the missing years too hard — when she starts thinking about the thing she doesn’t think about. “We don’t know I was dead.”

“We don’t even know we’re alive.” Chuck moves his hands vaguely, like he’s trying to explain something and failing miserably. “I mean. I think we are. But I have no evidence it’s true.”

She waits for him to go on.

“I think we’re like a reserve,” Chuck says, finally. “A backup plan. I think they’re putting us in place.”

“For what?”

“For when Sam and Dean fail.” Chuck’s mouth twists. “And they’re going to eventually. They have to. They’re only human.”

She doesn’t know what to say to that. She doesn’t feel like an angelic backup plan. Like she was sent back to Earth for a reason.

She doesn’t even feel like she was dead. Staring out at the rain beating down on the dust and wrecked cars, she just feels small. Insignificant.

“Anyway,” Chuck says. “You said you’d tell me yours.”

“It was my mom,” Charlie says. She rests her head sideways against the headrest of the car. “She died when I was — wherever I was.”

“I’m sorry,” Chuck says.

Charlie takes a deep breath. “It’s more complicated than that.”

And she tells Chuck the whole story. The sleepover, and the car crash, and the running, and then the long, long years of figuring out how to pay the medical bills. Coming back to visit her mother, always hoping that there was a bit of her still in there, that some part of her knew her daughter was with her.

And then Charlie woke up in an apartment she didn’t remember renting, with computers at least a couple years newer than her old ones. Clothing she didn’t remember buying. A tattoo she didn’t remember getting. 

H was there, one of the few touchstones Charlie always kept from one life to the next. But every previous time Charlie had to blow up a life and make herself a new one, she remembered the old one. 

And she figured — _okay. I got into something over my head. Something I didn’t want to remember._ But then she went to visit her mother, and found her gone. Dead. Several years earlier.

“I think I could deal if it were natural,” Charlie says to Chuck. She’s not looking at him. She’s looking out the garage door into the rain, which is coming down in great fat drops as the thunder moves away from them.

“Someone killed her?” Chuck says.

Charlie swallows. “According to the medical records, I did.” She shakes her head. “I mean, took her off life support — pulled the plug. According to the medical records, her daughter came and made the decision.”

“And you don’t remember,” Chuck says.

“Worse,” Charlie says. “There’s a lot of stuff from those years where I don’t remember it, but I understand why I’d have done it. Like, running — I enjoy that. But I can’t figure out how I got to a place where I could do that.”

“Maybe it wasn’t you.”

Charlie turns to look at Chuck. His eyes look concerned. They’re sitting next to a vampire’s corpse and talking about their feelings, and it’s the most _Supernatural_ thing Charlie could imagine without an actual Chevy Impala. 

“I hacked the security cameras,” Charlie says.

“And it was you?”

“They overwrite their footage every three months.” Charlie looks down at her hands. “But… even if I had photographic evidence. I’m still not sure I’d believe it.”

Because that’s what it comes down to. When you find evidence that a version of yourself you can’t remember did something unexplainable, something where you can’t trace a line of understanding from your past behavior and who you always knew yourself to be — do you assume it’s true? Or do you refuse to believe?

Charlie still can’t decide. 

They stare out into the rain until the rain dies down, and the storm has moved on, and they can get in their car and leave the vampires and the ruins behind.

* * *

Charlie’s out for a run.

It’s gray and almost-raining out, which is welcome for the feeling of cool on Charlie’s forehead, but is also making her sports bra chafe like a motherfucker.

When she gets back in, Charlie’s taking a shower and heading out for a possible case two states east, where her news flagging system popped on a possible active haunting. Nothing too complicated — empty house, three ghost sightings. Well within her current abilities. She’s got her “respectable paranormal researcher/writer” costume all ready to go.

Chuck’s a couple towns over, set up in another questionable rental house. Charlie runs his infosec now, so he’s been able to go back to writing the Marvey Brothers. With Charlie between Chuck and his agent, there’s no way someone else could track him with corpus analysis. 

He doesn’t want to hunt. After the shit he’s seen — the shit he’s been through — Charlie gets that. But he’s available for questions. 

It’s not like her hobby needed to be working in IT. 

Hunting for the things that go bump is dangerous, but she gets to _save people_. Heady stuff for a daughter who spent all her adult years unable to save her mother. 

Maybe Chuck’s right, and they’re being held in reserve. Maybe somebody up there has a grand plan. Maybe Chuck’s wrong (actually, that’s the way Charlie would bet).

But in either case, she’s choosing to try to make a difference.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading! <3
> 
> If you're interested in more Charlie, there is a prequel/companion piece to this that I'm working on now, and planning on posting under the same series.


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